In need of more compounds

According to this article (http://www.autosport...t.php/id/103899), Hembery says that more compounds would bring more thrill to sport. From my perspective it is rather useless. Why they won't just bring a bit "softer" compound on some tracks, for example in India, they could bring Soft & Super-Soft (you could do like 20 laps on soft). Or make tyres that has big difference in lap time (like 1sec between compounds but less durability). At the start of the season, and in general in 1st half of it, compounds were way better than atm. Drivers can go for half a race on 1 compound that is a softer one from 2 possible. I'm not a big fan of 4/5 stoppers, but these 2-3 stoppers should be there in each race.

Isnt it just better idea to make tyres a bit more fragile, but with wider operating window?

Tyres are exactly the same than starting the season, just teams know how to use them way better.

They´re right, they need more tyre compounds. During tyre war era it wasn´t strange a brand taking 6 compounds to a track for a racing weekend, so expecting them to cover every circuit with 4 is a joke. This way you´ll always get ridiculous 4 stoppers somewhere and rule inforced 1 stoppers in others.

At the start of the year each teams gets a set number of each compound, and it's up to them how they allocate them across the 18 or so weekends. There'd be no spare capacity; bringing a softer compound one weekend would mean having to trade to a harder tyre another weekend. They'd be free to turn up with just a single compound on a given weekend, or all four. The compound of tyre they hand back after FP would be nominated before the start of the weekend, so they couldn't hedge their bets.

It strikes me it'd throw up a serious number of permutations that would make life difficult for the engineers and their spreadsheets to predict the optimum.

I actually liked the durability of the tyres in India. I guess mostly that the tyre situation isn't the same everywhere - fine with me if sometimes long fast stints are possible without looking after tyres a lot, and sometimes not.

It's easy from my armchair to criticize this and that, but generally speaking I think Pirelli are doing a good job. I think their more open approach compared to Bridgestone brings them some flak, but that's always the price for a bigger visibility and openness.

I think the point with this latest thing is that it should be difficult to do a one-stopper, and the softer compound shouldn't be able to easily last half a race distance.

Maybe it could be interesting if the teams were able to choose between 3 compounds or more and have to use two of them in a race, but sometimes this kind of thing looks good on paper and in reality it's just a mess.. so who knows.

I'm happy they announced they will throw something different at the teams in 2013 because not much else is changing technically, which is unusual.

Well, you said it... the Perez one-stoppers were special. Hembrey doesn't seem to say he want to eradicate that kind of thing, Pirelli wants more flexibility in order to bring stuff that is closely tailored to every track.

Having something that brings the team closer to a catastrophic tyre failure is a big no-no for any manufacturer, and having bricks that don't wear off makes the 'use two compound' rule stupid and pointless, like what we saw in India.

They just want the flexibility to be able to provide something that will stay in the middle of that balance at each event.

My initial thoughts are why does Pirelli need to ensure 2 or 3 stops per race?

Even if we are to run with this "FIA mandated us to improve racing...." line that we hear, how is 2 or 3 stops improving racing?

Wasn't Perez's 1-stop specials exciting?

I am afraid that the whole thing is just becoming farcical.

I have had enough of race manipulation, even in the name of competition.

but if these tyres gonna be bulletproof, drivers that care about their tyres more (and especially CARS, cause these are the most important factor in that [look at Mercedes and compare it with RBR/Lotus/Sauber]) wont have any "+" for their driving style and car properities. + it is boring (I mean boring as f***) when on some track, tyres are bulletproof and track doesnt give you a chance to overtake unless smn will hit the cliff, in that case, we won't see any overtake (even this so called "artifical"). tyres as supplier to F1 should find a common language with teams/FOTA/Bernie/whoever is important and think about how it should look like. Cause if Monaco would have fragile tyres -> people would even have chance to overtake there (for example 1stopper vs 2 stopper).

but if these tyres gonna be bulletproof, drivers that care about their tyres more (and especially CARS, cause these are the most important factor in that [look at Mercedes and compare it with RBR/Lotus/Sauber]) wont have any "+" for their driving style and car properities. + it is boring (I mean boring as f***) when on some track, tyres are bulletproof and track doesnt give you a chance to overtake unless smn will hit the cliff, in that case, we won't see any overtake (even this so called "artifical"). tyres as supplier to F1 should find a common language with teams/FOTA/Bernie/whoever is important and think about how it should look like. Cause if Monaco would have fragile tyres -> people would even have chance to overtake there (for example 1stopper vs 2 stopper).

but if the tyres are sh!t then drivers who are quick and push do net get any + for their driving style

Am i the only person that thought that the 2005 tyre rules were quite good??

Anyway, i'm sick of Pirelli. They should just make ONE compound. ONE. That is a control tyre. Why won't anyone accept that the car 'formula' is still very much broken and needs addressing rather than these band-aid gimmicks like toffee tyres and flappy wings?

Am i the only person that thought that the 2005 tyre rules were quite good??

Anyway, i'm sick of Pirelli. They should just make ONE compound. ONE. That is a control tyre. Why won't anyone accept that the car 'formula' is still very much broken and needs addressing rather than these band-aid gimmicks like toffee tyres and flappy wings?

And you propose to make one tyre that works in Monte Carlo and at a permanent high-speed track, how exactly?

More compounds would be OK, but the teams need to be allowed to use whatever they wish!

This. The mandatory compound gap at each race means one tyre will always be the best, simply removing that gimmicky rule would mean we wouldn't need to see more compounds. Pirelli should provide a choice of two tyres that work, then let the teams extract the best from whichever suits their car.

Am i the only person that thought that the 2005 tyre rules were quite good??

Anyway, i'm sick of Pirelli. They should just make ONE compound. ONE. That is a control tyre. Why won't anyone accept that the car 'formula' is still very much broken and needs addressing rather than these band-aid gimmicks like toffee tyres and flappy wings?

That's the problem with giving the teams access to all the different compounds every race, the teams will figure out which one will do 85% of the job, they'll build around that and spend most of the time on it.. and they'll qualify on whatever is the fastest at each track.

This translate into 1 stop races..

For example, if we take last race in India, if you give full access and Pirelli brings everything, we remove the tyre usage rule; you could have the teams qualify on the super soft and easily run the race on hards without even stopping or make 1 stop and use the softs if you can win back the time spent in the pitlane, which is a gamble in that example because the tyres showed signs of lasting forever..

Also, almost forgot again, if you remove the rules and thus remove Pirelli's ability to keep things on the safe side with the combination of the various tracks characteristics and what the tyres can do, the teams will invariably lean towards the edge and one of these days something bad will happen, someone will kill himself with an ugly tyre failure and Pirelli is gonna be a murderer.

If "working" for you means that the car is able to trundle around the track, then yes. Otherwise no.

What's the difference between that and what the majority of races have been this year? Stroking around 10s off the pace.

1 tyre, it will react differently to every surface/temperature, teams will have to setup the car accordingly to make them work/last depending on the track.

Having Pirelli meddling with compounds etc is un-needed and was only ever a quick-fix for dull races. As was proved in India, if the tyres last, nothing much happens. Which proves that the car/circuit formula is still as broken as it was 2 years ago. If everyone is happy for 'whacky-races' to continue with Pirelli creating EVEN more toffee compounds, then fine, but i'll go watch some actual motor racing instead.

Let Pirelli create at least 8 different compounds and let the teams test them pre-season.

Abolish the forced use of 2 compounds per race.

Each driver chooses before FP1 the 2 compounds for that weekend (from the 8 available) and let them use them in any possible way during the race.

We may see different strategies and nothing forced upon the drivers/teams, actually all the good/bad choices will be back on the ones that matter, the teams/drivers. The main thing for this to work is to have a very large choice of different but close to each other compounds.